Found another site that has a variety of textures for free. Love Texture has stone, wood, nature...

I don't often use just texture background or pictures but, I'm sure they have a good use.

If you are trying to match your picture color with boarders, text, or backgrounds you may want to see the post I have here about ColorZilla for Easy Color Matching. I have been using it & it works great. Even for those little spots in pictures that I want just the right color but, would take me hours to try & match on my own.

I had kind of forgot that we had this huge list (this is page 2 now) right here - geesh, I really shouldn't have any problems finding the perfect picture for any article.

Ok, here's another one. This site lets you create a FavIcon from an image. http://www.html-kit.com/favicon/ For those not familiar with FavIcons, they are that little picture displayed in the address bar of many sites.

You do have to click the link on the bottom right of a Creative Commons photo at Flickr before using it, to check up the exact requirements for the photo you want to use.

Now a good friend of mine, who is an excellent amateur photographer, has over 4,000 creative commons photos on Flickr. You can use any of his photos, and all he asks is that he is credited on the page that the photo appears (not just in the Alt text). It would be nice if anyone using his photos also linked his name back to his Flickr stream. Here are his photos:

I use GIMP http://www.gimp.org/ on almost every image for my blog posts. Lately I've even found it relatively easy to create original images using third party plugins and brushes for Gimp. Creating an original image, or using a picture I took myself (usually a mix of both) saves me the worry about copyright and attribution.

Isha, I LOVE Garrys pictures! He has some very unique stuff like the Graffiti. They are so cool! Of course the plants and animals always rank high on my list of likes! He might be considered amateur in some realms but, I'd say he is a PRO! Thanks for leaving his link so I can find it easily!!

Brian, you are talking way over my head. I know Brad & Cait have used GIMP now they us Paint.net Best Free Image Software. Brad has tried to help me with it but, it is easier to just tell him (or Cait) what I want & let him fix it. I have my limits and art is way off the chart as to what I can do.

The graffiti comes mostly from an area along the south bank of the river Thames in London, where it's allowed. And also Banksy's stuff which is now considered valuable artwork so that gets left alone all over London.

Sheryl Loch wrote:I know Brad & Cait have used GIMP now they us Paint.net Best Free Image Software. Brad has tried to help me with it but, it is easier to just tell him (or Cait) what I want & let him fix it. I have my limits and art is way off the chart as to what I can do.

Gimp is *so* useful Sheryl & quick, it's worth persisting. I just use it for cropping photos, and making them smaller, for resizing them kilobyte-wise, and if I need to turn around a photo that's lying on its side.

The "tool" you want to click on for the cropping is the pen-nib looking one, which is 2nd from the right in the third row down in Gimp 2 for Windows. You draw with it on your photo starting from the top left of where you want to crop, along to top right and then down to bottom right. It automatically creates a rectangular crop with straight edges, so you don't have to worry about hand-shake. I'm always conservative about my crops & crop them in bit by bit. But you can always do Ctrl+z if you want to undo a move.

I am no pro photog, I just wanted somewhere to put pictures that I take. I couldn't see putting them on someone else site. People can use them, but I do ask that they leave the watermark and give a link back. I don't think that is to much to ask.